Applying the CLA in Brazilian Basketball with Gabriel Barbosa

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Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Today we're joined by Gabriel Barbosa. Gabriel and I connected several months ago on Instagram and immediately hit it off. I was really impressed reading his dissertation, which he's just done. And I think it's always interesting because people ask me for empirical research proving the CLA works specific to basketball in a basketball study.

And Gabriel's done some incredible work with this dissertation, and I wanted to invite him on to talk about that and how it relates to his experience as a coach in Brazil. Gabriel, it's a pleasure to have you on.

It's a pleasure to be here, Alex. You are such an inspiring coach for me. I saw you a few years ago and I've been Watching everything you do. I bought your book. It's a great thing for basketball and CLA. It's a great combination, you know.

And that's it. I think it's really hard to find CLA and empirical research. That was my main goal in my dissertation, to try to relate with basketball situation and with the youth level. But I tried to make all the way through from under-12 to under-20.

I had only a few athletes, so I cannot say like we have a lot of sample so I can prove everything, but it is a start, you know, it is a start.

I love it. And I think it was, I think it was a pretty good sample size because what, it was 80, was it 80 players? I think if I remember.

It was 30 players.

Oh, okay.

Because it was 6 players from each category.

That was it, it was the 6 age groups under 12 to 18s.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I did like 3-on-3. 3-on-3 with 4 types of constraints to see what happened on this type of small-sided games.

I love it. So let's get into that, Gabriel. I want to— I've got a bunch of questions here from reading the dissertation, and I'm obviously hoping that it's published soon so that all the coaches can read it. So could you just explain your context for the coaches listening in terms of how you're both coaching in Brazil and kind of what level you're coaching and the work you've done at university and how you bridge both elements?

So it was kind of an emergent situation because when I was— I started coaching at 19 years old, but coaching youth level, and I always try to understand how can I change the way I teach players because I didn't want to repeat what I was taught when I was a basketball player, you know.

One day I found Kirby Shirk, the Canadian coach, on YouTube.

Exactly.

Then he says Don't teach them plays. Didn't teach them how to play, and they kind of blew my mind on the time. Then when I was 26 years old, I am 31 right now. When I was 36 years old, I start coaching in a professional level here in Brazil.

I started in the Division Two, assistant coach in a Division Two in Brazil, in Cerrado Basketball. And then I coached for a year as assistant coach and under nineteen. And then we went to the first division. The team went. I went to the 4th division and the pandemic comes in 2020.

So we had a lot of time and then I figured out to try to go to a master's degree and I got in touch with embodied cognition. I started to study about cognitive psychology, how can I improve my coaching through cognitive psychology, and I found embodied cognition and I was like, this is almost the same thing that occurred like 5 years ago, 7 years ago.

And I went to a pedagogical university, University of Brasília. pedagogical area with specialization in cognitive psychology. And I found ecological dynamics 5 years ago. I found it and I, I was like, man, this is such a great way to understand the skill development, to understand how the game is moving, how the game is developing.

And I try to connect everything with my coaching with ecological dynamics because I think it was so convergent. You know, and then I start my master's and I try to dive every aspect of the CLA, of the ecological dynamics with the CLA, and I try to bring about some results in small-sided games.

Yeah, for youth level, you know, so I could make some more empirical research for this area that is growing and show that it works, you know.

I love it. It's, it's needed because It must be, you know, I can count on the fingers of one hand here the number of studies we have right now specific to basketball that are ecologically kind of initiated. I think we've got more looking at small-sided games, but not specific CLA.

And like I always say, there's a difference, you know, between small-sided games and CLA. So, you know, I loved reading the dissertation and I think it was really good because you outlined all the ecological language and the theory, which I always think is very important.

Yeah.

So the title, I'm just going to read it out, Gabriel, for the listeners, and then I'd love if you could just expand on what the title actually means for the coaches listening and really what you were doing and what the aim of writing this piece was.

So the title was The Effects of Offensive Time and Decision-Making on the Tactical Performance of Youth Basketball Players During 3-on-3 Small-Sided Games. So I'd love it if you could just talk a little bit more about how you laid it out and, and really what you were doing with this dissertation.

Okay, first thing was when I was studying the CLA, I was like, how can I measure that? How can I measure? It's so hard to measure because it's such a different way to think about cause and effect. And a lot of ways to measure things in basketball come from another framework, not from a dynamical system framework, you know.

So I looked for a type of measure that was made by a professor here and a coach in Brazil. And they try to connect ways to actions that basketball players do in offense and defense. They say space dynamic of creation, then space protection dynamics, right?

And I tried to measure through that, but I was like, okay, how can I do small-sided games with CLA? So I thought about 4 types of constraints, right? So the offense time is like the shot clock. So we have 24 seconds. 12 seconds on the shot clock and 6 seconds on the shot clock, play 3-on-3.

Yeah.

And what is the difference between them 2? And then we have 5 seconds to have a decision maker. So the guy, the athlete can get the ball and he has 5 seconds to make a decision. So he can pass, so he can dribble, he can shoot.

He has 5 seconds. And the other constraint was like, you have 3 seconds to make a decision. So you have less time to make a decision. And then we give like 6 seconds with 3 seconds to make a decision. 6 seconds on the shot clock, with 5 seconds to make a decision, and we try to look for what was going on, you know.

And I try to relate these constraints with the theory, with the constraints-led approach theory, and how the constraints can limit some behaviors, but how can the constraint enable some behaviors.

Yeah.

You know, because sometimes when we say constraints-led approach, the connotation of the word constraint looks like we are limiting, right?

Yes.

But we are limiting This is the half of it. The other half we are enabling.

I love that. You are. You're constraining to afford or enable. I like that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's great. Okay, so those are the constraints. And essentially, in terms of how you set the study up, so you have these 30 players in different age groups and they're from one club in São Paulo, I believe, right?

Yeah, yeah, it was the club.

Awesome. And they were doing these small-sided games. And could, could you talk more, because I think this is really interesting, Gabriel, how you are measuring it? You spoke about, it was those 2 metrics, right? Really, I can't remember the terms you used. It was like space, it was something related to—

Like space creation dynamics.

Yeah, a lot to talk about that.

Yeah, so this is a measure that 2 professors, one coach and one professor in Brazil, they made because they, they watch like a lot of games and then get some patterns from what the offense does. So pick and roll, and if pick and roll, drive, spot-up shot, if you play one-on-one on the perimeter, if you go to the basket, if you post up.

So they have all these categories, right? And then on the protection side, it's like how you play defense on the pick and roll, the ways you play the pick and roll, the way you play on the off-the-ball screen, the way you play defense.

So if you are neutral, you're going to the middle, you go to the baseline. I was measuring that and I correlate that, those situations With, uh, positive outcome and assists, you know, right? To see what type of constraint, which type of constraint is that really tough, because what type of constraint can make you behave in a certain manner, like can make you be attracted to certain affordances, then you can try to use it.

Love it. So this was the study. What were the findings? What did you, what did you see? With the datasets from how you set this up?

The findings was that if you have less time on the shot clock, if you have like 6 seconds, you're probably gonna make more individual decisions. You know, you're probably gonna drive to the basket or you're gonna try to shoot the ball as quick as possible.

And on the age 18 and 20, under 18 and under 20, we have more collective solutions. when you put some less time on the shot clock. We can have more, we're gonna have more individual decision-making, but at the level of 18 and 20, we still find some collective situations.

Like a pick and roll or like a 2-block pick and roll.

Yeah, yeah, things like that. We didn't find any difference between the 5 and the 3 seconds to decision-making.

Okay.

We found the 12 seconds, if we have 12 seconds on the shot clock, You probably gonna have more assists on the game, I think, because if you have only 6 seconds and you drive to the basket, you think a lot about you are really going to the basket, you know.

When you have more time, you have more possibilities to action, to give an extra pass or things like that. And I said on my dissertation that I have only 30 players and 6 from each category, so I cannot say that like this is the result, this is what happens.

No, this is something that I found with a sample with this size. There's some, uh, some way to contribute to the, to the research on the CLA level, you know.

Yeah, exactly. I think temporal constraints, just time, it connects though, Gabriel, like with everything I've been doing practically. And I think one of the most consistent kind of constraint manipulations I use is shot clock in all the small-sided games. And I think you have to do it because What I often see too is when I first work with especially youth players, I see that they're very scripted trying to run patterns on offense, like pass and cut, which I've spoken a lot about.

And what I often find is that the best constraint to get them actually attuned to affordances which are more attractive and aggressive is the short clock, where you literally just play a 3-on-3 with, like you said, a 5-second, a 6-second clock.

Yeah.

If you do that, it makes a huge difference versus if you just say, all right, game's approached, 3-on-3, go, and you're not constraining it. They're just going to do the same behaviors and look for the same intentions that they've always had.

Yeah, that's it. I really like to play with the shot clock. Sometimes when I coach my under-22 team, I play 5-on-5 with 14 seconds, right? Play 14 seconds, 14 seconds again with 14 seconds, right? If you score, Under the first 8 seconds, you get the double.

If you make 2 points, that's worth 4. If you get 3, that's worth 6. And then this is such a messy, but you see a lot of emergence of really driving to the basket, being aggressive. And, you know, it's really great.

I think what I'm thinking, Gabriel, like listening to this, just want to echo out to coaches the importance of— I think I've kind of challenged coaches listening to this to have a shot clock on every small-sided game in the next practice. I think it's the easiest way to use the CLA better.

And I don't know about you, but I've— a few things I've done is number one, the coaches I work with start getting in the habit very soon of giving the shot clock in everything we do, or training the players. So what we've done is when we have a player waiting in a small-sided game, they are actually counting the shot clock out, or we get the defense to do it.

And I found that it's so much more consistent if you do that in everything we do. Like yesterday in practice, I was doing a 1-on-2 gauntlet, right, where we one defender in each area and they had to get the ball across the sideline, you know, going in 1-on-2.

I initially did it without a shot clock and you can imagine what happened. The behaviors weren't realistic. They were taking like 15 dribbles, and then you just constrain it, 8 seconds, boom, changes everything.

That's great. And you can use— I use time and I use like decision-making to— time to decision-making. Sometimes I do some constraints like 3-on-3, but if you get the ball, you cannot fake and you only can dribble in vertical or you cannot just get and dribble the ball.

So you gotta attack, you gotta get the ball attacking, you gotta shoot, you gotta pass. If you're not, it is a turnover, you know.

I love it. Something we've done there, Gabriel, is we've done— when we— something I've tried is when you have the dominoes, the advantage, you must be 0 seconds, just like you said. And we don't— we ban fakes like jabs and all that. And then if you're neutral, we give you an extra 2 seconds to get to the trigger.

But if you're still— if the intention isn't there to get into the trigger, turnover. And it changes a lot. So I want to ask you this. A lot of coaches say, all right, can you give me a study comparing a CLA group to a dominant approach group of drills?

And can you do this compare and contrast where you compare CLA to the drill approach. And it's very difficult to do something like that because of, you know, basketball is a complex system and all the variables at play. Could you explain just to the coaches listening why we can't just— why doing a compare-contrast study like that is really challenging?

Yeah, because as you said, basketball is a really complex environment, you know. So how can you know what are the specific causes that make behavior happen. And how do you know in this situation the behavior solved the problem? But how do you know this behavior is going to solve every time this same problem?

Because it's not a well-defined problem, it's not a mathematical problem, you know. So you have such so many variables that you can measure. And then when you go— but you can do it, you can do it in some, in some situations, right? In basketball, you can do it.

You can compare some studies that compare. I don't remember if I went to a basketball study, but I went to a tennis study that compare. Soccer study. We have a lot of soccer studies, and then sometimes the effect is the same. The effect is the same on the test, but on the retention is different.

And sometimes the measure is the same, but the variability or the adaptability is different on the group of the CLA. So you have a range. of solutions that's different from the drill or the traditional approach, you know. That's it. And I, yeah, I think one guy is one of my— the guys that I studied from is Rob Gray.

Exactly, Rob's great. Yeah. And then he has a lot of those type of studies in his website, right?

He's got them. One, see, this is— I think you described that so well. And I'm actually speaking with Gray Thomas, who's, you know, a colleague of mine here at Transforming, and we are talking about actually doing this where we set up like a number of players in different groups and we get them doing CLA activities, traditional activities, and we compare the results.

And exactly like you said, on a test might be the same, or even the traditional group do better, but then the retention, the performance itself, we see the difference. But then like you said, it's the cause-effect is always challenging because, you know, you could have a kid in the traditional group, but maybe he spent his whole youth playing in a park or practicing variably with his friends, or maybe forms of life.

Like maybe his dad was a professional player and he got to hang around pros, go to practices and learn from watching their behaviors, right? And that's why I actually think the CLA framework is even stronger because it accounts for those things when we look at the 3 types of constraint.

And it's acknowledging that all, you know, individual task environment, it's all of these things which are having an impact on the player. And I think that's different to the dominant approach where I think coaches view it much more as cause-effect, where it's like, I want to do this drill, it's the linear effect, they're going to get better.

Would you agree with that?

I agree so much with that. And I think like this, sometimes I feel like as coaches— and I did this before, right? I'm trying to not do this right now— but sometimes we think basketball has one solution to every problem. We have one solution To every situation sometimes, you know.

So if you play a step, a step on the pick and roll, so you pass the ball right there, and then you pass with one hand, you put your feet on that side. So we have this thing, right? And this is a cause and effect thinking that really challenges us.

And as a coach, I felt like when I started to embed this CLA in my approach, in my pedagogical style, I felt like I don't have the answer. So when I'm trying to plan the season, I know what I want to do, I know the structures, but I want to be open to things that happen on the practice that I don't know and can emerge.

And I can see, oh, this is a new situation, this is a new solution, so I can put this on my structure, you know. I don't have every answer. And sometimes I feel like if you don't do this, if you don't— the coach says do that, And you don't do it because some variable was different, like the step wasn't aggressive enough, or the guy is— the ball slipped a little bit, and you gotta, you know, like, it's such a decoupling of perception and action.

If we think as CLA and ecological dynamics, we wanna have a structure, we wanna have a design to afford players to be aggressive, but we gotta understand that There's not a solution for everything. You know, there's not a solution for every situation. And we don't know all the solutions possible.

And that's why it's such a hard thing. You know, it's such a beautiful thing too.

It is like, because I'm thinking there, I think the best example is maybe coaches become so scripted on not just set plays, but also maybe coverage solutions. And even, let's say, even something like a switch, even if a team always switches, the switch is going to be different every time.

Because of the positions, the spacings, the players involved. So you can't just have one or two coverage solutions that you want the players to do because there are literally, yes, you might have one or two things you really emphasize, but there's still going to be so much variability and they need to be flexible to actually, you know, look for and attune and act on these things as opposed to just your one or two pre-rehearsed solutions.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. And then you can learn from those solutions, right? Because you don't have a coach, you know. Sometimes you really think about a lot of ways to solve, but on the context, things that emerge you didn't even see before.

So I think that was impactful for me because now I have an open space on my planning, on my structure too. So this place did that and I didn't know it, so I can take this situation to my structure too, you know.

That's fantastic, Gabriel. Some of my favorite research was the forms of life work by Luis Iohara in Brazilian football and looking at, you know, it was so I gotta ask you this just in terms of, you know, obviously basketball is your background, but everyone knows Brazil as a football country.

And I think it's so interesting when you consider forms of life and the CLA in that context. You know, what are your thoughts just in terms of forms of life that may be more unique in Brazilian basketball? And maybe, I don't know if that's anything interesting there in terms of, you know, this is a very loose question, I know, but whether it's forms of life related to player behaviors and maybe how coaches could have an awareness of them or harness them, or maybe even forms of life with coach behaviors.

And, you know, maybe their openness to CLA, or I don't know, what do you think about that?

That's such a great question, Alex, because I think in soccer we are really unintentionally a CLA country, you know. We don't know that we are, but we are, because in a cultural level, Brazilian guys like to play a lot. We like to have fun, we like to, you know, and we have the soccer culture in Brazil reflects so much that The way of being in Brazil, the form of life.

And we have a lot of research on that too, that we have poverty, we have a really tough country here. And if you go to soccer players and you see the historical context, they come from a really hard place. But in a social level, this is really bad.

But when you see it in an ecological dynamic level, you see that they play soccer in such a different context. If you don't have a soccer ball, everything can be a soccer ball. You know, you have a soda can and you gotta organize the thing that you say that everything's gotta count.

They count, they count the score because they don't have a shot clock. They organize themselves.

Yeah.

They play. So when they go to an organized situation, they have so much of the generacy, you know, the way you can solve problems with different solutions in different contexts. That is crazy. It's really mind-blowing. If you go to Ronaldinho Gaúcho, Ronaldo, the things that they did was like— and then I don't know if they did come from an organized situation, they would be as talented as they were, you know.

That's it.

Because it's such a different context. And basketball, I think basketball is difficult in that situation because to play basketball you need to have a backboard, you need to have a basket, you know. So You cannot play on the streets. You gotta have a ball that can dribble.

So basketball in Brazil is an organized main sport, you know. So if you want to play basketball, you can play sometimes in some streets or some courts. So a lot of players play in an organized manner.

Sure.

In Brazil, it's really— I think coaches in Brazil really are oriented with the traditional approach. As in every place.

Exactly, it's everywhere.

But I think in the US it's different because the NBA is such a big thing, and the NBA is so related with CLA and decision-making and spacing and modern basketball principles, and that converges so much with the ecological dynamics. And Brazil is a FIBA basketball country, right?

So we are really oriented to European basketball. And if you go to Spanish leagues, they're really great, but they're still on set plays, on shot clock situations. And I really think in Brazil we are changing, you know, I'm trying to change. I'm trying to reflect on those things.

I'm really NBA guy oriented, you know, but I think it's different from soccer. Nothing's like soccer here in Brazil. Nothing's like soccer. And soccer is a really case study for CLA, for real. Soccer is a really strong case study for CLA.

Great stuff, Gabriel. I really enjoyed this podcast episode with you, and we will have a link to your social media on the footnotes of this podcast. And obviously we will keep coaches in the loop with your dissertation, and hopefully when it's published, then we can send the link so coaches can actually read it.

Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

I appreciate you much, Alex. Uh, you are really an inspiration for my work here. I'm really happy for this. I'm really happy. I'm, I'm a great fan. I'm a great fan.

All right, I appreciate it, man.

I'm really enjoying your book, and thank you. Thank you for having me back.

Talking more. Thank you, Gabriel.

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